At last I found GW in the top brood box and marked her and immediately lost her again as she squeezed through the queen marking cage as my back was turned. I took her hive apart and pulled the twigs and brood frame apart. The brood frames in the two supers had to have the extra brood cut of the bottoms before they would fit into a regular brood box. The hive is now on a new floor with a double brood box, a super and above that a large old box feeder filled with the spare brood comb. Wether or not the bees will look after this brood remains to be seen as does a green winged queen. She should be red of course.
The mount pleasant swarm has good looking striped queen. Now marked green.
The North Walsham swarm has been building up well and the queen is laying plenty of eggs right now. But there is too much chalk brood in the hive for my liking. There was less on the new drawn out frames but then they have have less time for it to develope. The queen is small and black (and now marked green) and I took her and several frames of brood out of that brood box and put them in a nuc box to go to Old Costessy. In a few days time I will also take out any queen cells. I am going to put a queen cell from Luke's german queen in there. The queen cells are building up in Norman's hive where the queen swarmed. I removed Norman's bees queen cells a few days ago and put in a frame of eggs from Luke's Carniolan queen. A first cross could prove to be a disaster but we will see.
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